KickStarter Underworld Ascendant Pre-Prototype Thread

[Infinitron]

I said Garrett's talkiness was in the Thief games' first missions only.

Doesn't really matter though because I don't believe the actual released UA will be this talky. Not for reasons of hardcoreness but because it's too much work to record all that voice.

 

[Athelas]

Movement looks sufficiently clunky enough to pass as a LGS game.

wat

 

[Unkillable Cat]

Some of the gar99xx lines are taken from Thief 1's first mission, while others are generic phrases that apply to certain circumstances, irregardless of the mission. "Generic guidelines," one might call them.

They come in VERY useful in the Fan Missions to tell people where (not) to go.

 

[Immortal]

I love how they used a female character when trying to get polygon to show the demo.

The game looks better then what we have seen so far, I mean it actually looks like a game as opposed to some college kid mucking around with Unity.

The biggest issues I have are the constant monologuing and the fact this is obviously a highly scripted tutorial level. The announcer is going on and on about how the Thief has to be tricky and can't just take the enemy head on.. Your fooling yourself bucko if you think every enemy will have this maze of stuff to drag them through in order to "outwit" them..

They should of released this demo as soon as possible or even better, have a demo like this when coming to KS - but whatever. Hopefully it doesn't suck but I don't have high hopes.

 

[Doctor Sbaitso]

They need tips from you bro.

 

[Excidium II]

The game looks better then what we have seen so far, I mean it actually looks like a game as opposed to some college kid mucking around with Unity.

The biggest issues I have are the constant monologuing and the fact this is obviously a highly scripted tutorial level. The announcer is going on and on about how the Thief has to be tricky and can't just take the enemy head on.. Your fooling yourself bucko if you think every enemy will have this maze of stuff to drag them through in order to "outwit" them..

Exactly.

P. sad demo for a supposedly LGS-like game. At least it serves to showcase the grafics.

 

[Doctor Sbaitso]

If the final game has that level of monologue beyond 5 minutes I am actually going to write a letter to Paul Neurath telling him what a fuckup he has become.

I also noticed that the sconce lit up when she looked at it, indicating it could be lit from her existing torch. That's shit can't stay.

 

[Darkzone]

I love how they used a female character when trying to get polygon to show the demo.
The game looks better then what we have seen so far, I mean it actually looks like a game as opposed to some college kid mucking around with Unity.
The biggest issues I have are the constant monologuing and the fact this is obviously a highly scripted tutorial level. The announcer is going on and on about how the Thief has to be tricky and can't just take the enemy head on.. Your fooling yourself bucko if you think every enemy will have this maze of stuff to drag them through in order to "outwit" them..
They should of released this demo as soon as possible or even better, have a demo like this when coming to KS - but whatever. Hopefully it doesn't suck but I don't have high hopes.

Are you ok? Do you feel good or did something happen to you? You sound less edgy and more mild.
It seems that Otherside had done some work and want present their work to get more money.

Zep Zepo
Where are you? Are you now abstinent and you stay away from alcohol? I miss your edgy posts.

 

[V_K]

Yeah, because turning voice acting off is absolutely impossible. No single game an existence had an option like that.

 

[Darkzone]

If the final game has that level of monologue beyond 5 minutes I am actually going to write a letter to Paul Neurath telling him what a fuckup he has become.
I also noticed that the sconce lit up when she looked at it, indicating it could be lit from her existing torch. That's shit can't stay.

Magic. Pure Magic.
You know that they made this poll, which character class combination you will play, and the most named combination was Thief / Mage. I think that they have used this to make their show case.

 

[Excidium II]

Yeah, because turning voice acting off is absolutely impossible. No single game an existence had an option like that.

Fuck right off with the "but you can disable it" argument.

 

[Immortal]

Are you ok? Do you feel good or did something happen to you? You sound less edgy and more mild.
It seems that Otherside had done some work and want present their work to get more money.

Zep Zepo
Where are you? Are you now abstinent and you stay away from alcohol? I miss your edgy posts.

My edgy shit posting comes from a stark juxtaposition to all the excessive fanboyism some games get. I really am not that edgy under normal circumstances but the more insane people get in their devotion to a game despite huge flaws the more I feel like I need to tear it down to break through their dense hand waving of all issues.

This game does look a lot better then their demo of barrels exploding and their dream interviews talking about ant nests and minecraft biomes. It still doesn't look great but at least it looks like a proper video game demo.
Before today - I seriously thought they were still dicking around in Unity trying to get cubes to jump around on platforms.

Fuck right off with the "you can disable it" argument.

> Game Devs Insert A Shit Feature
> Fanboy Rationalization #1: You can disable it!
> Fanboy Rationalization #2: Mods Will Fix it!

 

[Arch-Vile]

Too much stupid, annoying monologue and too many fucking scripts ae my two biggest complaints at the moment. Hope they won't remain in the final game, or else I'll be very pissed off.

Yeah, because turning voice acting off is absolutely impossible. No single game an existence had an option like that.

So you're saying we should allow this kind of fuck-ups "as long as they can be turned off". Are you retarded? Adding inane, continuous one-liners would make this game a failure as an LGS-style game, and it's their absolute fault, not a player's responsibility.

Why do you think nobody ever complained about Garrett talking too much? Because their one-liners were conveniently placed, and that's exactly what they should do with Ascendant (that, or just remove VA completely).

 

[Beowulf]

Come on people, it's a scripted demo. Like Infinitron already said, such excessive VA is most likely for demonstration purposes and will not be in the game, at least not in that form (tutorial like).
I liked what I saw, but the gameplay from such a narrow FOV was pretty jarring to watch.

 

[Immortal]

Come on people, it's a scripted demo. Like Infinitron already said, such excessive VA is most likely for demonstration purposes and will not be in the game, at least not in that form (tutorial like).
I liked what I saw, but the gameplay from such a narrow FOV was pretty jarring to watch.

Sorry, Kickstarter doesn't get the reasonable doubt of Innocent until Proven Guilty, Too many turds have burned people before.
Better to grab a pitchfork and torch first until the witch sinks or floats.

 

[Infinitron]

Playable prototype for backers coming at the end of the month: https://www.othersideentertainment.com/forum/index.php?topic=876.msg14948#msg14948

So to answer a few questions...

First of all THANK YOU. It is gratifying to hear that our core backers like the progress. General internet rumbling can be a bit discouraging.

We wanted to (a) keep the demo short and (b) really try to nail the concerns you guys had on look and feel. For that reason there is a lot of depth that you won't see until the playable around the end of the month.

We were playing with the Shadowbeast look and animations right up o just before ship so yes, this is an iteration, not a necessarily a final look. I think the way he fades between shadow-look and in-light look is pretty cool. Again you couldn't see much of that in the video but you will when you get to play around with him.

My primary job in all this was as the "Shadowbeast wrangler" aka AI designer/implementer so let me clarify a couple of points.

None of this was "scripted" in the sense that all of the Shadowbeast's actions were based on real AI. Again, you didn't really get to see him do his stuff fully, but his attacking the theif's torch was because he recognized a light source in the environment and responded to it. You also didn't get to see much of it but he hammers on the closed door and that, too, is dynamic recognition of something in the environment to react to.

Finally, if we could have spent more time in the big room you would have seen that he responds to light levels and will stop chasing you long enough to put out torches you light.

This is all the beginnings of that context aware AI we promised you and its working pretty well so far. We still have a lot of work to do though to make it easy for our level designers to use and to fill out responses.

Last comment, the voice over is not necessarily what will be in game at all. We wanted the video to be clear as to what was happening to people who knew nothing about UU and thought the VO was the quickest and most dramatic way to do it.

 

[Immortal]

Nice - I can get behind that.
Looking forward to seeing more not shitty stuff.

 

[Doctor Sbaitso]

Well, that is VERY encouraging. Carry on, dudes.

 

[Infinitron]

Well, that is VERY encouraging. Carry on, dudes.

Did you pledge enough money to get it? Otherwise we're just going to be seeing it on Twitch & YouTube, because I certainly didn't.

 

[Darkzone]

Did you pledge enough money to get it? Otherwise we're just going to be seeing it on Twitch & YouTube, because I certainly didn't.

mindx2
mindx2 certainly did pledge enough money. ( mindx2 did you pledge $300? ) So perhaps he could do a review of the prototype for us and a video where he explains everything.

 

[Doctor Sbaitso]

Did you pledge enough money to get it? Otherwise we're just going to be seeing it on Twitch & YouTube, because I certainly didn't.

I pledged $215 so I believe I get pre-alpha builds. Not sure if that includes this upcoming prototype though. I re-read the tiers and I see that at $300 you get "early access to prototype". Whether that is exclusive access I am not sure.

 

[Darkzone]

I pledged $215 so I believe I get pre-alpha builds. Not sure if that includes this upcoming prototype though. I re-read the tiers and I see that at $300 you get "early access to prototype". Whether that is exclusive access I am not sure.

It pretty much sounds like it is.

This.

Did you pledge more than $300?

 

[Doctor Sbaitso]

I asked on their forums.

Also, the Producer chimed in:

Hey All
Like Jeff said, Thank you. Without you guys and gals this would not be possible.
VO- this is really just for the video to help 'tell' the story. Now Lydia who is our protagonist in this story may show up in the game as an NPC somewhere.
This demo was really about locking down our look and feel. I agree that the shader on the beast still needs some work to match up with the world. Animation is not near final.
I'm quite pleased on the general look of the environment we have here- color, hue, saturation. Painterly but not in the cartoony way. This is something we will continue and refine.
But hey..for 3 months work...I think it looks pretty damn good.

We learned a ton- limitations of engine, and features that we can exploit- we have barely broken the surface with the lighting system for example, and really getting a grasp on what is going to be 'hard' and what won't be too difficult. AI, systems, player movement all are places we still need to do a bunch of work.
It is a bit linear...which felt weird to build since that is about as opposite to our mantra as possible. We promise the next one will show more actual what you can do gameplay in it.
As for invisible walls--gods no. I hate that.
Yes in the final game you can free roam...if you fall in the lava or a bottomless pit...tough luck.
As for looking like Bioshock--sure this demo has some of that DNA feel. But that is not what we are building ultimately. We decided when we built this demo it was about our look, as much as the kickstarter was about gameplay. It was the biggest pole we needed to sort out internally, and well, now we have--at least we have a direction to continue with.

 

[Melan]

What UA seems to highlight is that one of the things Kickstarters have stripped away from games is the degree of secrecy that actually benefits both players and publishers. Game development is something that's always full of false starts, unfinished assets, clunky gameplay and plain bad ideas being floated and hopefully shot down. With KS, there is an expectation about status updates which either encourages publishers to deceive their paying customers, or release unfinished materials which the audience nitpicks apart. UA's campaign was probably hurt by their early footage as much as their (real) marketing ineptitude. Okay, it was a result of marketing ineptitude.

Realistically, this is an unfinished game at an early stage of development. The projects aren't directly comparable, but Thief was... whatever it was early on, it wasn't the game we got in the end. It went through the dark Arthurian swordfighting game phase, the techno-mediaeval shooter phase, and the kinda-thiefy kinda-sneaking shooter phase. Not even the designers believed in it until the shadow and sound-based stealth system was put in its place at a very late stage of development.

I don't know if the end product will be good (that depends on their skill, their finances, and the ability to tie those two together), but you can't realistically expect a game that promises creative design to present a fully realised, smooth experience in what is still called a prototype phase. What we got in this demo is this, however:

• Game has a colourful fantasy look that's fairly good looking (maybe a bit too much blue and orange going on, but hey, that shit is everywhere )
• They are looking into introducing nonstandard game mechanics - like keeping a monster away from you with light manipulation, and destroying it with a massive dose of it.
• I also spotted a lame mechanical trap; they've got to work much more on that aspect.

Which is not bad.

 

[Zep Zepo]

If they had anything besides scripted non-sense and *tee hee* *giggles* VO you'd of thunk they'd show it.

What is really happening here.

1. Steal Fire Heart!
2. OH NOES, MONSTAR!
3. Scripted monster pretends to be afraid of light, weakly fails to attack your torch.
4. RUN FOREST RUN! (you go through door)
5. Monster script lags behind in first room until you use heart on first object
6. Monster appears at door and waits while you advance to next scripted event.
7. MONSTAR SCREAM (scripted)
8. Light some pillars at your leisure. Monstar nowhere to be seen.
9. Descend stairs.
10. Light big light!
11. OH NOES! MONSTAR APPEARS ON STAIRS.
12. Monstar dies.

That is not AI, that whole video is a scripted event.

And it still looks like shit. But that's what you get for 800K. So keep sucking that Looking Glass dick, believers. That's what they are counting on.

Zep--